How Does Leader’s Boundary Work Influence Team Boundary Work and Team Performance

With the growing recognition that teams do not function in a vacuum and that external team boundary activities play an important role in successful team outcomes (Joshi, Pandey, & Han, 2009), some researchers raised important questions as to how teams manage their boundaries and what results they achieve through team boundary activities. The answers to these questions are found in studies on team members’ boundary work. This paper attempts to build a theoretical model of how leader boundary work facilitates team boundary work and team performance with two research questions: a) antecedents enhancing leader and team boundary work and b) mechanisms underlying through which process leader boundary work affects team boundary work and team performance. The present framework represents that leader boundary work can be affected by leaders’ characteristics of self-monitoring and dual identity, and leader boundary work can promote team boundary work and team performance. The model also suggests that leader boundary work influence on the team boundary work through emergent states of psychological safety and team boundary work norm, and team boundary work is proposed to mediate the effect of leader boundary work on team performance. This model contributes to fill the gaps of boundary work research, by proposing elaborate antecedents based on leader behavior. In addition, the model presents mechanisms which explain how leaders' boundary work promotes team boundary work through emergent states of psychological safety and team boundary work norm. Based on this theoretical model, this study suggests several directions for empirical model related to the level of analysis, measurement issues, appropriate sample, etc. Other contributions and limitations are discussed in the end.